‘Woman of the Hour’ Review: Anna Kendrick Directs a Thriller About the ’70s Serial Killer Who Was a Contestant on ‘The Dating Game’

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s a notorious freak moment in daytime television. On Sept. 13, 1978, one of the three competing bachelors on “The Dating Game” was Rodney Alcala, who turned out to be a serial killer; he was captured the following year. (He was convicted of five murders, though it’s believed that he may have committed as many as 130.) It’s no joke — or maybe it’s a meaningful one — to say that Alcala had the looks and personality of a 1970s ladykiller.

He was coiffed like one of the Hudson Brothers, with a chiseled grin redolent of Engelbert Humperdinck. He practically beamed good vibes — along with some semi-submerged bad ones, answering his “Dating Game” questions in a way that was so confident it was…aggressive.

TV, of course, never got much kitschier than “The Dating Game.” I used to watch it as a kid, marveling at the fact that the entire show, with its Herb Albert-on-happy-pills theme music and its flower-power décor, was a kind of leering, smirky put-on that made no great effort to hide it. (It was the first show I’d seen that seemed to be about the sleaze culture of Los Angeles.) I always thought that the squirmiest moment each week was when the bachelor who’d been chosen came out from behind the barrier, and after giving the bachelorette that ritual polite kiss, the two would stand there, arms around each other, as aviator-framed host Jim Lang described what would be in store for them on their date (it would usually be something along the lines of “Because you’re going on an expense-paid weekend to…Tuscon, Arizona!”), as if they were already a couple.

You could say that “The Dating Game” was “The Bachelorette” of its day. And the fact that a serial killer from the Ted Bundy school (outwardly.